Duke23

How have I never seen this before? Just started playing around with it and the "standard fly-by-wire" mode is literally all I ever wanted for my planes. Looks like it does a few other cool things too so I'll have to check that out, but I'm really impressed so far! It feels nice to fly without constantly fidgeting with things.

Thanks for the update! I recently started a new game after a pretty long break and I'm happy to see this.

Been playing around with some stuff close to home, testing for extraplanetary use. The most recent and arguably most interesting, is my long haul heavy transport rover! Featuring 6 load bearing wheels, 6 fuel cells and 4 seats standard, with optional SAS and RCS for tough situations. Turns like a boat (trust me it's a feature) and carries enough fuel to run for... Well, I have no idea how long but I'm guessing a really long time. Unintended cool side effect of the design: It pops wheelies like a champ with a load! The guys and gals in the hitchhiker module don't look too impressed though.

Working on setting up a Duna outpost of some sort. I have sent my prototype crew transfer ship out with a couple anomaly mapping probes to see how the new design works (not impressed so far), and had already sent ahead a low res mapping probe which turned out to work quite well aside from some minor power issues due to an oversight. The original mapping probe arrived about 60 days ahead of the crew transport and hooked up with Ike to map everything out and run some high and low orbital scientific studies, then dropped down to the surface for some more in depth data. Then it headed over to Duna to do the same, and ended its mission there. Here it is just after leaving Kerbin's SOI, and again in its final resting place. (I thought ahead and only deployed one solar panel for reentry, then deployed the other on the ground). The crew transport has now made its way into orbit after dropping off its two anomaly probes. The Ike probe has made its rounds with better equipment than the last probe and is currently awaiting a crew member to swing by in the central pod (hopefully) and pick up the data. The Duna probe is in position and ready to begin scanning. I am currently planning the next phase -- This crew transport must return to Kerbin for lots of science points, then a new and improved crew transport will be sent (this one has no ability to land and return from Duna, although the pod may be able to make a trip to the surface of Ike) with a skycrane and a rover. I may send a small remote controlled rover to scout out a good spot in the mean time. Then the plan is to send along a refueling station and later when I have all the tech involved, there will be some mining equipment sent. But some of this is a long way off and subject to change!

That's impressive... I always wanted to do something like that but I have a hard enough time juggling 3 missions headed to the same place so I typically send things at least a few days apart. I know, transfer windows, I don't use them

Played around some today and last night with a few missions I've been planning. I flew low res ScanSat probes over Kerbin and Mun for the practice, landing the Mun one in a crater that I wanted to explore manned. Sent in the manned mission which went pretty smoothly but I decided I was wasting valuable time by not trying to explore more. Here's a nice shot of the original lander before it left Kerbin orbit. Yes it's overkill for a Mun lander, but I play science sandbox so I can design my own missions and build whatever I want. So I cobbled together a crappy rocket rover (looked very similar to the one I posted a few pages back, unfortunately for me) and sent it off in a funkified looking custom rocket with an inverted fairing (courtesy of Procedural Fairings). It was a case of the right tool for the job and a little bat-crap craziness. The idea was to land it upright on its three engines, then use the RCS to slowly tip it over on its side so the rover could drop straight down a few feet onto its wheels. It worked beautifully but I don't have a shot of this particular rover being released: I don't seem to have a pic of the rover itself either because it was short lived, I took it for a spin outside of the crater I was hanging around in and crashed it. Actually, I crashed it several times if you count the quicksaves but the first few times were because I was trying to fly it to my destination and land on the wheels, which I've done successfully with other designs like my second one. I let the last crash stand because it was pure chance / destiny and I'm trying to cut back on the quickloads to roleplay through the disasters. So I sent a second one, to get myself back to my ship since I was somewhere around 60km away when I crashed! This one was based off my old designs that actually did pretty darn well for the tech level involved during the first few Mun landings of a new save. But I crashed the lifter that brought it there due to a screw up on my part... I had the navigation assist set to hold retrograde but I burned too long and started going back up so it started flipping slowly end over end, I panicked and by the time I had something resembling control over it I was too close to the surface. Luck was on my side; not only had I had left the fairing on until landing, but it crashed on the correct side for release. The fairing and the rover survived unharmed so I just shrugged it off since cautiously tipping over the whole thing was one less step I had to do at that point. Edited to add: I almost forgot -- my luck continued because oddly enough, the landing site for the second rover was close to... without going into detail, a certain point of interest on the surface that I was planning to send a more advanced ScanSat to find later. I was able to spot it on the descent and visit it in the new rover to plant a flag. After getting back to my ship I decided I had enough fuel to hop over to another crater and do some surveying. Only problem is I was low on fuel in the main landing stage (it was only designed to land once, and carried extra fuel for any precision maneuvering I wanted to do afterwards). So I took off and dropped the three outer tanks, and managed to land in close enough to a flat spot for the SAS to hold still sitting on the engine while I hopped out and grabbed a soil sample. Then it was time to blast off again, I managed to burn up the rest of the fuel in that tank somehow by the time I was on an escape trajectory from Mun. So I was left with the final stage and only a little maneuvering to do to get back home. It actually went better than planned since I was able to make the third biome stop before heading home. I was really nervous about coming back home because this design was largely untested in the first place and I was counting on doing a few passes of aerobraking to burn off my excess speed and not become a giant ball of melted steel on the ground. I had wanted to put a heat shield below this last engine that "could" be jettisoned if the need arose, because I never planned on actually using the final stage anyway, but I didn't for some reason. I also decided to not decouple the last tank and expose the heat shield I did have, because I thought I might try to change my trajectory after the first couple passes. But not being sure of the atmosphere in 1.0+, I dipped lower than I probably should have and everything miraculously turned out okay. There was no other pass, my apo lowered and lowered until finally I was hitting dirt one way or the other. I seemed to be red hot in the 15-30km range for ages biting my nails. Some of my external components got close to overheating and the solar panels didn't make it since apparently you can't retract that type anymore. After I finally threw my chute I breathed a sigh of relief and decoupled the last tank, touching down softly in the grasslands. The pilot got a stern slap on the wrist for crashing the first rover and holding up the mission, but it was soon forgotten once the new science data started to pour in.

It's been quite a while since I played (burned out!) so I decided to boot up 1.0.4 today after grabbing some mods and DO SOME SCIENCE! I'm still weird about career mode so I just made a Science game and started to go at it. Probably since the days when I spent hours on end playing were back before there was a career mode and it never sat right with me... So I started building some crappy looking stuff! I think this was my first rocket in this game to make it to stable orbit. Apparently the aero has been tweaked yet again since the last time I played, so there were some rough patches along the way, but we made it. And my low tech science jet-rover that netted me about 300 science points just by cruising around KSC's general area. (No ladder so you have to hop up one of the rear wheel supports) And the terribly designed "MultiProbe" that is equipped to take several kinds of scientific readings, scan celestial bodies, and also (hopefully) land on Mun. This particular one was just a test and Kerbin scan, the one that actually goes to Mun will be slightly different. Funny story about the probe, it went up in a fairing so in the VAB I set one of the internal batteries to lockout "just in case" (completely not thinking that through). Everything on the launch went fine, I separated the fairing parts and was cruising to a better inclination for scanning, then the probe started spinning dead on the dark side of Kerbin. The battery resource meter said 0/15 even though I had 6 small batteries on board. I started thinking, oh crap I read somewhere that you can't use certain things inside service bays! I thought I'd have to scrap the mission. Once I got back into sunlight I opened up the bay and saw that (duh) not one but all six of the batteries were set to lockout, AND it was oriented in a way that barely charged anything while it was in the sun. Now it's chugging along just fine. KSP, I have missed you...

So far I haven't had much luck with SSTOs so I'm a little discouraged... I just assumed I could drag out my pre-1.0 ones, do a couple modifications, and keep on rolling. Not quite. Good news is they all fly fine in atmo with minor tweaks (at least, at reasonable speeds and altitudes below 20km), bad news is not one will get me an apo above 65km as of right now. I'm getting close with a scaled down version of one that used to be very successful. Funny part about that is the larger one used to be my "masterpiece" that outperformed any SSTO or atmospheric plane for that matter that I had built, in every way. Now it's a deathtrap the instant I switch to closed cycle and nose up. The smaller version I've been tweaking, which used to be slow as molasses and barely able to take a payload up, is now insanely fast and surprisingly stable compared to everything else I've dusted off so far. Still no orbit though. Butthurt aside (I spent a lot of time on these), I think it's going to be fun once I get the hang of it again.

Nothing extravagant, the opposite really. Science mode. It's named the Clusterf*** because sitting on the launchpad it looks dangerous at best, and it's based on a design that likes to point at the ground during the gravity turn. I don't have a shot of the whole thing...

I'm highly impressed with it so far, and I said so in the main thread. Now if I could just get one of my old SSTOs to work in the new atmosphere... lol.

I was pretty impressed when I started up the game, knowing next to nothing about what this update actually brought. I have been off the hype train on this one to continue giving myself some downtime from KSP to "start fresh" with 1.0, haven't "really" played since .25. Seemed like things were more balanced, got some new parts, and the new atmospheric flight model... All good stuff. Then I read this list of features and fixes and all I can say is WOW. Well done, well freaking done. Now back to trying not to burn up in the atmosphere

Flying cars as we'd think of them now would just get people killed... We can't even drive on the road correctly, it's in no way a good idea to send Joe Everyman up in the air with a 2 ton missile. But there is technology in the works (and some of it pretty far along) that lets cars drive themselves, to some extent if not fully. Once that's perfected then flying cars may be a reality. However, I'll take my hoverboard now please and thanks.

I've had a love-hate relationship with the funds aspect since it was introduced, honestly. I really like the idea of it but when it comes to actually spending my time building up cash so I can upgrade this and that, I end up not having time to launch the missions I WANT to do. Luckily a fair amount of times the contracts will coincide with something I want to do, but a lot of times it's like work and then after a couple launches I wanted to play around with, it's back to grinding. I've played a little in Career mode in the latest version and I like the new features, but I still feel like I'm grinding. I look at how much the upgrades cost and think I'm going to have to do a lot of contracts just so I can start building my Mun space station, or whatever. I get that it can be done and it's "not that hard" but I don't always want to spend the time I have allotted by staging random parts in random places, sending up the same satellite 5 times, and rolling around a rover on Minmus looking for something that doesn't exist. At the same time I enjoy that my SSTOs have a more useful purpose and can bring down old satellites for some cash, and I appreciate the idea that "messing around" launches come at a price. I guess I'm just glad they left Science mode an option and I may be going mainly back to that. At the moment I'm doing a little of both but I keep getting frustrated. This is something I don't think I really mentioned before, but it's a main reason I was taking a break from KSP. I wonder how plausible it would be to have an in-game contract editor? Design your own contracts in game, and the game decides how much it's worth. Would that completely defeat the point? It'd still sort of be grinding, but it'd be more enjoyable. Again I'm not saying the current system is "too hard" or "not enough funds", I'm just saying it's not as fun for me to grind like that. Now if I was playing the game like a non-sandbox game and going through contracts deliberately and in a linear fashion to complete the game, it'd be completely different and there probably would be "too much funds".

Initial thought: This is pretty awesome! Admittedly I'm behind on this update, I purposely kept myself pretty much in the dark about it ever since it was announced. I wanted to look at it with fresh eyes instead of a bunch of expectations of what this or that feature will be like. (I tend to pick out one or two things and convince myself that it's going to ruin the game for me). It feels a lot more fleshed out. The new limitations feel logical and the graphics look freshened. I haven't built anything big enough to see if there have been any optimizations, but I can hope So far so good... I do get an occasional screen flash that shows my Windows taskbar, but it's always while loading a menu or something and it hasn't dropped me to the desktop yet. It could just be my graphics driver acting funny, wouldn't be the first time. Just wanted to throw it out there in case anyone else saw it too (W32 release). Anyway, back to the game!

Thanks for sharing guys! It's always good to see people who still remember the 90s computers. I know a lot of people don't think they're that old, but they have a place in my heart because it seems like that's when computers started to become commonplace and a lot of the major advances happened so quickly. That and I was born in '87 so these are things I saw back when they were the hot new thing. It really is easy to forget how far we've come in such a relatively short time. That's a nice looking model, Yarbrough... And what a gigantic hard drive it had Sorry to hear about it being destroyed though. I don't remember what HDD my first (IBM compatible) computer had but I still have an old laptop hanging around that came with a 40mb one (the Librex) and I fondly remember taking apart a 540mb drive from an old Dell I had because I thought I could fix it. Needless to say it never worked again. And sedativechunk I don't miss those darned CRTs either. Except maybe the 17" flatscreen one I had. For years I wouldn't get rid of it because it looked so much better than the LCDs of the time, but it eventually died. That thing must have weighed 50lbs. Oh, I recently got a 4gb CF card for my Dell XPi. I'm planning to use 2gb for DOS / Win3.1 and 2gb for Windows 95 if I can get them to play nice. I haven't had time yet because I have been messing with another toy I picked up for cheap (nothing in the scope of this thread, it's an HP Mini 1104).